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Auditory temporal acuity following noise exposure.

This project was designed to evaluate changes occurring in the human auditory temporal acuity caused by listening to moderately intense sounds for brief time periods. A gap detection threshold procedure (GDT) was used to estimate temporal acuity. Objectives were to determine whether temporal acuity was affected by an exposure to a brief, intense tone; post exposure changes in temporal acuity were related to temporary threshold shift (TTS); temporal acuity and absolute threshold recovered at similar rates; temporal acuity and absolute threshold exhibited the same pattern of affected frequencies; and post exposure effects were related to the frequency of the exposure stimulus. Experiments were performed presenting Huffman sequences in either the forward/forward (FF), backward/backward (BB), or forward/backward (FB) direction. The listeners' performance in the FF experiment was in good agreement with earlier studies. With only this information the authors would conclude that the temporal jnd is about 3 milliseconds (msec). However, using the BB and FB experiment data results in temporal jnd estimates ranging from 1msec to 10msec, suggesting that something other than pure temporal processing has influenced the results.